Real-time social distance measurement and face mask detection in public transportation systems during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic Era: Theoretical approach and case study in Italy

Due to its remarkable learning ability and benefits in several areas of real-life, deep learning-based applications have recovered to be a research topic of great importance in the last few years. This article presents a method devoted to guaranteeing safety conditions in public transportation systems (PTS) during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic era. The paper describes a viable real-time model based on deep learning for monitoring social distance between users and detecting face masks in stop areas and inside vehicles of public transportation systems. Detections are made using the deep learning approach and YOLOv3 algorithm. The safety rule violations are represented by red bounding boxes and red circles in a bird’s eye view as output of the video surveillance analysis. The datasets used to train the neural network are the “Caltech Pedestrian Dataset” and the “COVID-19 Medical Face Mask Detection Dataset”. Metrics, such Loss Accuracy, and Precision, obtained in the testing process of the neural network were used to evaluate the performance of the model in detecting users and face masks. The proposed method was recently tested in the Public Transportation System of the Municipality of Piazza Armerina (Italy). The results show a significant reliability of the method in detecting real-time interactions between users of the PTS in terms of over-time variations in their mutual distancing, as well as in recognising cases of violation of the imposed social distancing and FFP2 face mask use.